Always Something - Dramione

Chapter Twelve

The Daily Prophet did not publish pictures of Draco and Hermione Malfoy laughing together in the street on a fine summer day. That was not the scene the Page Four editor had sent the not-so-intrepid photographer to capture. The goal had been to document any strange new comings and goings by the golden trio, or to find one member of the couple leaving alone and follow them somewhere scandalous. The Page Four team would have welcomed anything out of the ordinary, even Gilderoy Lockhart's visit, which they happened to miss. Anything would have been better than sweet photos of a handsome married couple getting along.

"They could tell you were faking," Draco scolded Hermione as she thrashed through the newspaper, looking for some sign of their performance.

"No, if I'd been visibly faking, then that would have BEEN the story," she argued.

He pushed the newspaper away from her face. "So you weren't faking?"

"That is not what I said."

"I think it might have been," he smirked. "You were in earnest."

"YOU were in earnest."

"Of course I was. And to an extent, so were you."

"Malfoy -- "

Hermione was cut short by the arrival of an owl -- a Hogwarts owl. She hopped up from the kitchen table to read the message from a Professor Stuve, the head of Ravenclaw House. "That'll be Pollux," she said as she untied the parchment.

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Don't need an owl to tell us that."

"Oh dear," she began. "He's been caught drinking on school grounds. And they suspect him of fighting too. It appears that someone punched him in the face, but he refuses to discuss it." She passed the parchment to Draco. "Poor little lamb, after what he's been through since the accident, who can blame him for needing a drink?"

Draco smirked. "So says his mother who thinks she's eighteen herself."

"I don't like that he's been hit," she went on. "Has that ever happened before?"

Draco shook his head. "Not since primary school. And why are these kids hitting each other, hand to hand? We always fought with our wands."

"Because we were trying to kill each other."

He dropped the parchment. "No, we were not trying to kill each other. That's a very important point and the reason why things turned out the way they did for everyone, especially you and me. We were desperate to find our ways through it all without killing each other."

He was leaning over the table, staring into her eyes as if he was looking for something in particular. She didn't know what it could be. She searched his face, from his dark eyebrows, to his pointed chin. Her eyes fixed on a faint white scar on his cheek. It was left by a cut that had been opened twice. The first time, she remembered, was in Malfoy Manor, when the chandelier fell from the ceiling, a shard of its crystal flying off to cut his face. The second time, she did not remember, was when he was cut by the jagged edge of a seashell in a sandstorm on a beach on the east coast of Canada, hours before she slipped and told Draco she liked him.

Her hands itched to touch the scar, to read it with the pads of her fingers. Of all the things mislaid from her memory, something important was hidden there. She knew it, somehow. And maybe she would have touched Draco's faint white scar if the Hogwarts owl hadn't screeched to be sent back.

"The boy," she remembered, reaching for a quill. Professor Stuve had requested a meeting with them, and of course, they would come.

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